Welcome to the FTX Safety Reboot

What is the FTX: Safety Reboot?

The FTX: Safety Reboot is a training curriculum for trainers who work with women’s rights and sexual rights activists to use the internet safely, creatively and strategically.

It is a feminist contribution to the global response to digital security capacity building and enables trainers to work with communities to engage technology with pleasure, creativity and curiosity.

The FTX: Safety Reboot currently contains the following 3 independent modules rooted in interactive learning activities to facilitate communities in sharing knowledge and values around representation and expression and to build confidence and skills to be safe and effective in online spaces.

Who is it for?

The FTX: Safety Reboot is for trainers working with women’s rights and sexual rights activists on digital safety. Trainers should be familiar with the obstacles and challenges faced where misogyny, censorship and surveillance are restricting activists’ freedom of expression and ability to share information, create alternative economies, build communities of solidarity and express desires.

How to use the FTX: Safety Reboot

Get to know your participants

Use one of the Training Needs Assessment methods described here to learn more about your participants.

Plan your training

Design your agenda based on what you have learned about your participants, their needs and interests, and suggestions in the Learning Pathways suggested in each module.

Learning Activities
The learning activities in each of the modules have been divided into three kinds:

Starter Activities are meant to get the participants to start thinking of a topic and spark discussions. For the trainer / facilitator, these activities can be diagnostic tools to observe what levels of understanding the group has, and to adjust the workshop based on that.

Deepening Activities are meant to expand and dig into the topics and themes.

Tactical Activities are meant to respond to multiple learning objectives in practical ways. These include hands-on exercises and practical strategising activities.

Localize your training

Activities reference real life examples and the more you can draw on local examples that are significant to the lives and work of participants, the more participants will be able to engage with the material and learning objectives.

We suggest familiarizing yourself with examples that are relevant to your participants and prepare yourself to speak about these. If you are able to engage with participants before the training, ask your participants for significant incidents relating to the workshop you'll be facilitating, research these more deeply so you understand the cases and can share them in the workshop.

Why the FTX: Safety Reboot?

The FTX: Safety Reboot explores how we occupy online spaces, how women are represented, how we can counter discourses and norms that contribute to discrimination and violence. It is about strategies of representation and expression and enabling more women’s rights and sexual rights activists to engage technology with pleasure, creativity and curiosity. It is a feminist contribution to the global response to digital security capacity building, bringing the APC Women’s Rights Programme’s unique methodology and approach, which we call Feminist Tech eXchanges (FTX).

The APC Women’s Rights Programme (APC WRP) has developed the FTX: Safety Reboot as a contribution to existing training guides on digital security but rooted in a feminist approach to technology. The FTX: Safety Reboot is a work in progress to assist trainers to enable activists to use the internet as a transformative public and political space, to claim, construct, and express ourselves more safely.

Our political framing and tool for analysis are the Feminist Principles of the Internet (http:// feministinternet.org), which shape and inform our work. The FPIs build our case for a safe, open, diverse and gender-just internet.

FTX creates safe spaces of exchange and experience where the politics and practice of technology are informed by local, concrete and contextual realities of women. These spaces aim to build collective knowledge and ownership. We are conscious of power relations which can be easily set up, particularly around technology, an area where women are historically excluded and their contributions invisibilised. We advocate for change through working towards consciously de- constructing these power relations.

APC WRP capacity building work bridges the gap between feminist movements and internet rights movements and looks at intersections and strategic opportunities to work together as allies and partners. APC WRP prioritises inter-movement building in order to bridge gaps and grow understanding and solidarity between movements.

FTX core values are: participatory and inclusive, secure, fun, grounded in women’s realities, transparent and open, creative and strategic, emphasise the role of women in technology, prioritise appropriate and sustainable technologies, and are framed by the Feminist Principles of the Internet. FTX explores feminist practices and politics of technology and raises awareness on the critical role of communication rights in the struggle to advance women’s rights worldwide. Recognising the historical and current contributions of women in shaping technology, FTX grounds technology in women’s realities and lives. We emphasise local ownership of FTX and have seen the uptake of FTX by our members and partners over the years.